Why Would A Dead Man 'Like' Something On Facebook?

Last month, while wasting a few moments on Facebook,
my pal Brendan O’Malley was surprised to see that his old friend
Alex Gomez had “liked” Discover. This was surprising not only
because Alex hated mega-corporations but even more so because
Alex had passed away six months earlier.

The Facebook “like” is dated Nov. 1, which is strange since Alex
“passed [away] around March 26 or March 27,” O’Malley told me.
Worse, O’Malley says the like was “quite offensive” since his
friend “hated corporate bullshit.”

Brendan sent me this info in response to a request I had made on
Facebook to my friends. Not long ago I asked people to send me
screenshots of weird or suspicious behavior. I did this
after noticing some bizarre things happening on Facebook —such as
friends of mine showing up as “liking” things that I know they
don’t like, such as liberals “liking” Mitt
Romney and a guy with no car who "liked" Subaru.

When I contacted these people they swore they had never liked
these brands, and they had no idea that this stuff was going out
under their names.

So what is going on?

The Mystery Of The Unintended Likes

Full disclosure: I’m an active Facebook user, and I really enjoy
it. I use Facebook to stay in touch with my friends and family
who are scattered across the country and world. I also use
Facebook to promote the arts magazine I publish, Sensitive Skin.

The first sign I saw that something was not quite right was that
after I’d spent a lot of time getting people to “like” the
Sensitive Skin page, fewer and fewer people were seeing my posts.

More people had been seeing my posts six months earlier, last
winter, when I only had 800 likes, than this past summer, when I
had more than 2,000.

Then I heard about Facebook’s latest idea, getting users to pay
to “promote” our own posts, so that more people would see them.

Nevertheless, in August I decided to give Sponsored Posts a try
to promote Sensitive Skin. That’s when the weirdness began.

Strange Results From Sponsored Posts

My number of post views did indeed go up, according the
statistics provided to me by Facebook. But these likes didn’t
seem like “quality” views or likes. I was getting likes from
folks in South America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Comments were posted not only in languages I couldn’t understand,
but in alphabets I didn’t recognize.

This was suboptimal — not to mention extremely weird — for a
literary magazine written in English.

Then I started noticing something else. “Sponsored Posts” were
popping up near the top of my newsfeed, and some of them made no
sense.

A number of my liberal friends supposedly had “liked” Mitt
Romney, for instance. And my friend Nicolala, a high school
English teacher from San Francisco, had “liked” WalMart.

I started tracking these unlikely likes, taking screenshots and
following up with IMs to my friends. I asked Nicolala if she had
indeed “liked” Walmart, and her answer was succinct:

I found it odd that my friend E.V. Grieve, who writes an
anti-gentrification blog about New York’s East Village, would
“like” Subaru.

I asked E.V. if he’d pressed the “like” button for Subaru, and he
replied:

Then he said that he went to his profile and “unliked” Subaru. I
asked, shocked, wait, you mean Subaru actually went and “liked”
themselves for you, without your knowledge?

The Plot Thickens

OK, that’s pretty messed up, I thought. I put out a notice on my
Timeline, asking my friends if they’d seen any unusual behavior
regarding “likes” and ads.

The response was overwhelming.

Patti Walsh, a teacher who lives in Minnesota, was not pleased to
see she’d inadvertently liked a household disinfectant, since she
had never “liked” this brand.

Ruby Ray, a photographer from San Francisco, and Bart Plantenga,
a radio host from Amsterdam, were also perturbed.

Bart was doubtful that his friend, a committed anarchist (hey,
it’s Holland) had actually liked a bunch of corporate brands.

In response to my inquiry, Martin Sarna, a graphic designer from
New York City, started checking around among his friends. He too
came up with a number of aberrant ads involving the movie “Life
of Pi,” San Pellegrino water and McDonald’s.

He annotated the screen grabs with comments from his friends and
sent them to me:

"No, I did not press like. Maddening. I look at Facebook less
and less because it lies more and more."

"I did not `like' San Pellegrino. This stuff is making me
want to get off the FB."

"It's counterfeit! I'm vegetarian and it's actually
offensive!"

I See Dead People … Liking Things

But at least those people were alive when they fake-liked
something.

Emma Kumakura, a game designer in Palo Alto, Calif., was outraged
to see her friend Alice Mizer Stewart, who had passed away in
March, shilling for a tea company.

Emma took a look at Alice’s profile and it appears that she did,
in fact, like The Republic of Tea. Nevertheless it’s kind of
disturbing to have people liking brands from beyond the grave.

Facebook’s Explanation

A Facebook spokesman says the “likes” from dead people can happen
if an account doesn’t get “memorialized” (meaning someone informs
Facebook that the account-holder has died). If nobody tells
Facebook that the account-holder is dead, Facebook just keeps
operating on the assumption the person is alive.

In that case, someone’s “likes” from months and months ago can
still keep surfacing in the news feeds of their friends, since
Facebook recycles “likes” long after they first occur. Who knew?

Thing is, according to my pal Brendan O’Malley, there’s no way
that his late friend Alex, who “hated corporate bullshit,” would
have “liked” Discover.

And what about all these other “likes” from living people, the
ones where someone is credited with “liking” something and they
swear they didn’t do it?

The Facebook spokesman says it’s possible those people “liked”
something by accident, by inadvertently pressing a button,
perhaps on the mobile app. In response to the specific example of
Nicolala liking Walmart, Facebook insists it really did happen:
“We show that the Like happened on 10/01 at 6:46 p.m.,” the
spokesman says.

Fair enough. But these accidents seem to be happening a lot. Are
there really that many people accidentally claiming to like stuff
that they actually don’t like at all?

It’s hard to imagine that Facebook would start “liking” stuff on
people’s behalf without their knowledge or consent. Even for
Mark
Zuckerberg, the guy who once said of his members,
“They trust me — dumb fucks,” this would be a stretch.

But are the brands themselves doing it? Or are third-party
services selling fake “likes” to brands? Supposedly Facebook has
been trying to
crack down on fake likes. Nevertheless they seem to keep
popping up.

This might be funny except that it’s also kind of disturbing. I
mean, isn’t the enormous market valuation of Facebook predicated
on its vast store of information about users, and its ability to
use that information to precisely target ads?

If Facebook can’t get this under control, what does that say
about the value of its data? The persistence of these fake likes
is an unnerving thing for Facebook users and investors alike.